Your car reminds you of Franka Potente
Gut check. She hates me, I have a new smell,
my windows airtight. She is afraid I will fall off a bridge,
nose first into brown water and not open the door.
Yowling on Fairfield past the cemetery, I remind her Jason
Bourne’s girlfriend
was shot in the head before the car crashed.
I am a dumb way to die. I would let her out of the car.
She scouts out the fawn chowing down on Yew hedge
on the drive back from work and we loop around the block.
I park at the strip mall. She crosses the road without
looking
to spy its neck movement in the grey-black dim.
Looking for a mother inside the cemetery hedge,
by the big mausoleum, seashell stone glowing off the moon
off the bay.
When she gets to the spot, her fawn is gone. She pokes her
head through the gap,
as if waiting for a guillotine. If a car knew what a
guillotine was.
Deer have no ankle joints. We’ve driven past dead ones
before.
Godzilla, again, in Hackney
I know he’s here before the city does.
What’s true is that I was never a part of the city.
I pummel the streets, pant in doorways,
crick my neck from the shoulder checking.
He finds me in one easy stride. My
shoelaces
slapping too loud on the tarmac.
I’m off again, into parkland in
the summer,
where the marsh meets yawning football
pitches
like the ragged edge of a cheap jigsaw piece,
with barbeques and music. He ignores their vibrations. Unfair.
In July, the grass is brown, good and unwatered.
Everyone here I tried to catch just as they were leaving,
now they all want a minute to talk.
A large part of the borough breaks
free, juts up like an aircraft carrier
into the River Lea, ducks and birds and
sewage overflow.
The yellow hats took a photo of us on
the USS Midway,
which Ben thinks they’ll use as blackmail.
Face to foot with my reptile.
I ask why he’s picking on me.
He thinks I act like I know more than anybody else.
At the Big House
wheedle away at cloves pressed into a lemon slice
for the smell, air moves as the crow flies off the Offaly
bogs.
You can’t keep a house like that warm.
Wind beating you over the head like a circus tent
assembling again and again when you step outside.
Glare over the grey sightlines to the unpainted house, which
they’ve done
nothing with.
I am a piking stick of deadwood keeping the clothesline off
the gravel.
My saliva would run downhill,
could reach any of those new building sites on the lane.
Fathers move their daughters next door to their
mothers.
Friends of the Cork doctors who bought the Big House
after the old owner sold its furniture saw a woman,
uninvited, by the walled-off garden.
Her back away from them standing before the spine of a
hazel tree.
The friends took her for a scarecrow.
